The City of Ladies opens at MCA

The City of Ladies, in all its 300,000 variations is on display at The Museum of Contemporary Art 30 March – 18 June 2017 as part of The National: New Australian Art.

Each 20 minutes the film is randomly generated from a pool of files creating new story combinations and possibilities. The film is loosely based on the fifteenth century book of the same name, by Christine de Pizan, considered a foundational text for Western feminism.

Text by Jiva Parthipan

Paris 1402

I feel changed all over. My arms feel stronger than beforeThe crying has stoppedMy appearance has changed, strengthened. My voice is deeperMy body harder and more agileThe ring that Hymen gave me has slipped from my fingerThis troubles me, as I loved it dearly. But then I stopped crying.My new self was strong with a hardy spirit. I was astonishedI became a real man (1)

Weighted by the gender inequality of the time, Christine de Pizan, an Italian migrant in France and arguably the mother of present-day western feminism, imagines a didactic feminist utopia in Paris. The Book of the City of Ladies describes a cataclysmic time in France, caught in much political and social unrest.

Paris 2017

Zanny Begg’s new film collaboration with Paris-based film director Elise McLeod, The City of Ladies (2017), is influenced by Pizan’s seminal text and deals with parallel narratives. Centuries later, it seems that not much has changed for Parisian women. Paris is a contested city problemetised by class, arrondissements, race, religion and gender. Here, seven films are imagined by young French women from various ethnicities, including Cambodian, Algerian and Tunisian, to create a utopic dystopian dreamlike filmic fiction informed by their personal lives. Each screening of The City of Ladies will be generated randomly in a different order by software programmer Andrew Nicholson, offering variant perspectives.

Sydney 2017

Begg is an arch manipulator of negotiating multiple contexts, histories and narratives through the medium of film. Her 2015 film 1001 Nights in Fairfield reconfigures the West Asian folktale for the Western Sydney suburb of Fairfield via an Iraqi choir, charting migration and creating home in a surreal film shot through a stunning blue lens.

The City of Ladies contains choreography of gestures from the Nuit Debout political movement set to the song ‘Who Loves the Devil’, which was performed during the Bataclan theatre massacre in 2015 in Paris. This version, covered by the Sydney post-punk band Mere Women, proposes new engagements with the lyrics. Another storyline charts a French Muslim woman’s life as seen through the prism of Joan of Arc’s appropriation by the far right and the triumphant French feminism informed by empire, as personified by the burqa ban.

But what’s in the film for a man living in Sydney in 2017 with multiple roots in the UK and Sri Lanka?

I am not a woman. I am a male feminist.

‘A male intruder in the hive’ reads a review from a major British newspaper that references my early career as the first male dancer in an all-female contemporary dance company informed by classical Indian dance. While it’s important to let the aggrieved persons define racism, nationalism and sexism, any real change is only possible when it engages the other.

The strength of Begg’s film is defined by its invitation for men, women and all genders in-between and beyond to reimagine 21st-century Paris in terms of how we perceive belonging in a world undergoing such transformation, no different to 14th-century France.

Nothing else but cant, instructions to Anya Rosen for a paired work for the Cartography of Imagined Places, a project between New York and Sydney, curated by Alex Wisser and Sarah Breen-Lovett (Sydney) and Jill O’Bryan (New York).

New York, January, 1916, Emma Goldman delivers a lecture advocating a women’s right to control her fertility. She is arrested and spends 15 days scrubbing floors and sewing prison garments in Queens County Penitentiary.

New York, January, 2017, America gets a new President.

This action honours the continuing struggle for a women’s right to control her own body.

Sew a feminist flag and place on a flagpole

Scrub clean the pavement in front of the flagpole

Stand on the cleaned pavement and read aloud the following statement from the trial of Emma Goldman:

“From whatever angle the question of Birth Control may be considered, it is the most dominant issue of modern times and as such it cannot be driven back by persecution, imprisonment or a conspiracy of silence…

Those who oppose the Birth Control Movement claim to do so in behalf of motherhood [but] so long as mothers are compelled to work many hard hours in order to help support the creatures they unwillingly brought into the world, the talk of motherhood is nothing else but cant…

We are told that so long as the law on the statute books makes the discussion of preventives a crime, these preventives must not be discussed. In reply I wish to say that it is not the Birth Control Movement, but the law, which will have to go. After all, that is what laws are for, to be made and unmade. How dare they demand that life shall submit to them?

I stand as one of the sponsors of a world-wide movement, a movement which aims to set woman free from the terrible yoke and bondage of enforced pregnancy; a movement which demands the right for every child to be well born; a movement which shall help free labor from its eternal dependence; a movement which shall usher into the world a new kind of motherhood…

I may be arrested, I may be tried and thrown into jail, but I never will be silent; I never will acquiesce or submit to authority, nor will I make peace with a system which degrades woman to a mere incubator … I now and here declare war upon this system and shall not rest until the path has been cleared for a free motherhood and a healthy, joyous and happy childhood”

——

To read a blog about the project click here.
Photos by Panos Rigopoulos, performance by Anya Rosen.

On October 13 2016 Sydney University Department of Political Economy, together with the Department of Anthropology, hosted a seminar with renown scholar and newly appointed Professor of The Department of Political Economy, Sujatha Fernandes on the ‘political economy of storytelling’, which will be further developed in her forthcoming book, Curated Stories: How Storytelling is Hindering Social Change, Oxford University Press, 2017.

The thrust of this seminar coincides with themes explored in 1001 Nights in Fairfield, in which liberating stories of escape and survival from Iraqi refugees in Western Sydney are combined with fictional stories from the famous story cycle, 1001 Nights, centred on the coercive pressure on the central character Scheherazade to tell a story to survive her murderous husband.

Sujatha and Zanny were friends while university students and this forum highlighted a interesting convergence between their fields of research and interest. Sujatha’s lecture provides a fascinating limit to the enthusiasm for story telling that has proliferated across cultural practices by exploring the ways in which its empowering possibilities can also be harnessed by neo-liberal agendas.

As the abstract for the forum outlines:

In the contemporary era we have seen a proliferation of storytelling activities, from the phenomenon of TED talks and Humans of New York to a plethora of story-coaching agencies and consultants. My talk, based on my forthcoming book, seeks to understand the rise of this storytelling culture alongside a broader shift to neoliberal free market economies. Suturing together a Foucaultian account of neoliberal reason with Marxian and Gramscian accounts of class formation, I develop a concept of the political economy of storytelling. I discuss how in the turn to free market orders, stories have been reconfigured to promote entrepreneurial self-making and are restructured as easily digestible soundbites mobilized toward utilitarian ends. In my talk, I examine an online women’s creative writing project sponsored by the US State Department in Afghanistan as an example of how stories can be drawn into soft power strategies of imperial statecraft in the context of military intervention. But I also conclude with some reflections on how we can find a way beyond curated storytelling, with a discussion of the Mision Cultura storytelling workshops in Venezuela.

To access a podcast of the seminar, reposted with permission, click here.

1001 Nights in Fairfield was announced as the winner of the 2016 Incinerator Art Award: Art For Social Change last night at the opening of the annual exhibition at the Incinerator Gallery, Moonee Ponds, Melbourne. Zanny Begg received $10,000, half of which she will share with the Choir of Love, the subjects of the film. The award was judged by Dr Vincent Alessi, Senior Lecturer of Creative Arts at La Trobe University, Hannah Mathews, Senior Curator at Monash University Museum of Art and Jason Smith, Director at Geelong Gallery.

1001 Nights in Fairfield / الف ليلة وليلة في فيرفيلد was produced in collaboration with the Choir of Love through a residency with Powerhouse Youth Theatre Fairfield and STTARS (Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors). The project engages with the politics of storytelling by loosely referencing Scheherazade’s struggle, in One Thousand and One Nights , to prolong her life by entertaining a murderous King with a series of inventive cliffhangers. The film combines documentary, imaginary sequences and improvised fictions to explore the pressure, and power, of telling a story to survive.

This extraordinary collection informs and inspires. Spanning the history of cinema it demonstrates the remarkable power of film to engage, move, provoke and contend. It’s a vital reference tool and instructive resource – Bill Nichols.

Disruptive Film Everyday Resistance to Power Vol 1, curated by Ernie Larsen and Sherry Millner has been released. A great collection including the work of Zelimir Zilnik, Martha Rosler, Chto Delat?, Ariella Azoulay and Oliver Ressler and Zanny Begg’s The Right of Passage (2013). The curators are interested in establishing a series on the history of film as a form of resistance. The collection is released trough Facets Media. To buy a copy click here.

Werner Herzog doesn’t dream, a condition that might explain his daunting output of films. He postulates that the nighttime void is compensated by ideas for films that light up like imaginary projections he can capture into rapid-fire scripts and screenplays. His latest feature film, Queen of the Desert, was written in 5 days with no revisions or edits – it floated before him like a waking dream.

For the last four days I have been part of the Rogue Film School a wandering and erratic workshop that brings together 50 hand picked filmmakers with one of the very great legends of film. The work begins with a session on lock picking, the patient art of which was ably demonstrated by his articulate and charming son Simon. The invitation to break through locked doors was justified by our “Natural Right to make films” (which sounds so much better in German) a right Werner argues overrides the petty confines of bureaucracy and law. Over the course of our school he recounted numerous stories of forgery and quasi-criminality that moved ships across mountains and enabled films to be made.

1001 Nights in Fairfield, 2016. Film selected for inclusion in the Rogue Film School.

Werner describes himself as part of the first generation of German filmmakers who were able to forge a vision for film after the destruction of WWII. Theodor Adorno famously argued that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”. For Werner poetry became the only answer to the barbarism of the world. In his eyes poetry is not only words on a page, but the scrawl of smoke from a volcano or the cryptic lines drawn by wandering feet on soil. Werner recounted how he walked the boundaries of Germany on foot after Chancellor Willy Brandt had (erroneously) told the population that the possibilities for reunification had been closed – a solitary attempt to heals the wounds of his country. A gesture he was able to reflect upon and share with people in North Korea, still caught in a divided country, during the making of his new film on volcanoes.

Werner is a deeply intuitive filmmaker. During the school he made the extraordinary (and perhaps unbelievable claim) that his recent film on the internet, Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World, was made without “any research”. While this may seem to defy the logic of the film’s subject matter it was also refreshing to hear how his love of classic literature could be as significant a form of inspiration for contemporary film making as google or wikipedia.

One amazing aspect of the school was the live collaboration between Werner and Ernst Reijseger who improvised a rough soundtrack to his upcoming film on volcanoes as we watched on. The found footage of Mount Eyjafjallajökull spewing forth black smoke morphed before our eyes into the emotive soundscapes we have come to associate with Werner’s films: all that was needed was the slow German accented voiceover of Werner musing on the power of nature.

Walking was a common theme for the workshop. For Werner travelling by foot puts you “in the world” and provides periods of necessary loneliness that allow films to germinate. Over the weekend he described many journeys by foot including the beautifully poetic gesture of walking from Munich to Paris to see his mentor Lotte H. Eisner for one last time before she died. The journey was urgent but he walked hoping to prolong her life by delaying his arrival.

The workshop was not without its own rogues of the Rogues. The required list of films that we had to watch and Werner’s personal selection of Rogue films to share came with a major blind spot. After three days of watching films made exclusively by men (mostly North American and European) we eventually rebelled and a passionate discussion broke out about diversifying our vision of film. Werner argued the identity of the director was irrelevant but was overrun by our demands to watch a film made by a woman. Catherine Fordham’s Consume, a sexual assault revenge fantasy, aptly demonstrated how female directors might show us different worlds. Promises were made to consider the reading and film list if another Rouge School is held.

The school had three main lessons: never complain, do the doable and take revenge. The first two came with such incredibly wild stories (a crew member, for example, cutting his own foot off with a chainsaw to survive a snake bite) they made complaining seem petty and the doable extraordinary. The last came with useful tips on small-scale sabotage and the destructive power of superglue.

The 2016 Rogue School was a very special chance to talk with Werner about how he makes film. It was also an amazing insight into how new artists, from a diversity of backgrounds, are picking the locks on filmmaking.

1001 Nights in Fairfield has been shortlisted for the Blake Prize for Religious Art at Casula Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, 2016. In the lead up to the prize the film has been in the media, below is an article in the Australian, December 9, 2015 and the Fairfield Advance, December 9.

1001 Nights in Fairfield, refugee tales from the choir
By Jennine Khalik

It was 2003, the year that the US invaded Iraq, when eight-year-old Yousif Yousif was kidnapped by men whose names he never knew. He was taken while walking home from school in Baghdad and tortured for three days.

Now 20, Yousif calls Australia home. He is a Chaldean Syriac refugee, a survivor who finds solace through hymns and music with an Iraqi Christian choir in Fairfield in southwestern Sydney.

“It was three days, but it felt like three years,” Yousif says. He doesn’t know his torturers. He didn’t ask. He describes some of his harrowing ­experiences in a work by Sydney filmmaker Zanny Begg, 1001 Nights in Fairfield, rec­ently shortlisted for the $35,000 Blake Prize for religious art.

Through documentary, imagined sequences and improvised fiction, it ­explores the power and the pressure of telling a story to survive, says Begg.

The essence of the Arabic classic One Thousand and One Nights is how one woman, Scheherazade, entertained a murderous king by telling him stories nightly to avoid being executed come morning.

“It’s amazingly empowering, but it’s also a pressure — it’s kind of the same position we put refugees in. You have to tell a story as a refugee; they are made to tell ­stories all the time,” Begg says.

Similar stories of abduction and extortion are told by refugees from the Choir of Love in 1001 Nights in Fairfield. The suburb is home to many of Iraq’s Christian minority refugees.

Iraq’s turmoil is often portrayed as a war between Islam and the West, but it goes beyond that, Begg says. Cultural diversity in Iraq is under threat, including that of the Assyrian, Chaldean, Syriac, Armenian and Mandean minorities. “It’s very traumatic and very relevant to today; a lot of them were kidnapped by Islamic State, their families were extorted for money,” she says.

The film intertwines the musical tradition of Arabic maqam to relay stories of love, war and exile. Christian, Muslim and Jewish com­munities in Iraq historically embraced maqam. “They had a dialogue through music, not one of hostility, but shared stories and shared spaces produced in the coffee houses,” Begg says.

Choir of Love founder Bashar Hanna, a former refugee, says more recent arrivals from Iraq and Syria have been joining the group, established in 2004 to help the cultural survival of new arrivals from Iraq. The choir works with the NSW Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors.

Yousif suffered from depression and anxiety when he arrived in 2011, but with the choir he has found joy. “I feel the happiness, I feel the love with them. I feel like who I am.”

Peter Weibel has put together an impressive anthology of activist art for ZKM. The book is huge and full of great projects and artists. There is a little feature on Zanny Begg in the chapter on How to Do Activism.

In the early 1970s, the New South Wales Department of Public Works invited Italian architect Dante Bini to Sydney to demonstrate his innovative building techniques, which involoved using air as a primary building material. Prior to visiting Sydney, Bini had wowed radical architectural circles with his ‘architectural happenings’; live performative inflations of concrete bubbles. His most famous clients – Monica Vitti and Michelangelo Antonioni – commissioned him to build their home close to the pink sands of the secluded beach as featured in the film, Red Desert. Recently, interest in Bini’s work has being rekindled as architects, designers and environmentalists search for ways to build more sustainable cities.

Join us at Design Hub for a special screening of How to Blow Up a Bubble that Won’t Burst, a short film created by Zanny Begg, commissioned by the NEW LANDSCAPES INSTITUTE for the exhibition, Groundwork: From the Archives Up. The film screening will be followed by a discussion between Zanny Begg and curator Joni Taylor.

Zanny Begg is a Sydney based who works with film, drawing and installation to explore ways in which we can live and be in the world differently. Her recent exhibitions include Utopia Pulse – Flares in the Darkroom, the Secession, Vienna, The List, Cambelltown Arts Centre, Ok Video Festival, Jakarta, Things Fall Apart, Artspace Sydney, Social Networking, Queensland Gallery of Modern Art and What Keeps Mankind Alive, Istanbul Biennale.www.zannybegg.com

Joni Taylor is the founder of the NEW LANDSCAPES INSTITUTE. Her curatorial projects explore the transformation of landscapes and address contemporary urban and environmental conditions though research-based projects.www.newlandscapesinstitute.org

Stills from How to Blow up a Bubble that Won’t Burst, single channel DVD, 2015, Zanny Begg

In 1974 three Binishells were erected at Narrabeen North Public School. The concrete domes were designed by Dante Bini, an Italian architect, bought to Sydney by the NSW Department of Public Works. The Binishells popped up from the ground in a matter of hours and caused an immediate sensation. People were amazed by the speed of their construction, their futuristic shape and most of all by their radical design, which used air as its primary building material.

As part of her research for the film How to Blow up a Bubble that Won’t BurstZanny Begg facilitated an interview between a group of primary students at Narrabeen North Public School, who study within one of Dante Bini’s Binishells, and the architect.

Annika: Why did you come to our school to build the first Binishells in Australia?

Dante Bini: After visiting me and seeing a number of Binishells in Italy, the Government Architect Ian Thomson decided, together with the Minister of Public Works Mr. Leon Punch and the Minister of Education Sir Eric Willis, to build a library at your school. I was very lucky and gladly accepted to design the first Australian Binishell as your library. In a symbolic piece of design, I conceived a unique spherical structural support for a large asymmetrical opening of two intersecting domes. The two Binishells represented sea-shells offering to young students the pearl of knowledge of the history of the world. The very first structure was raised by air pressure on May 30th, 1974 by the staff of BC&M (Building, Construction and Maintenance of the Department) under my supervision and it was an instant success.

Amber: Why build with air?

Dante Bini: I believe that compressed air is the best, simpler, more economic and ecological energy man can use to lift and shape all construction materials to obtain a basic, architectural expression. If well controlled, compressed air can produce very natural-looking forms, easy to blend in their natural surrounding. Do you know that a low compressed air can lift tons and tons of reinforced wet concrete in minutes?

Annabel: An an architect who do you design and build for the people who commission you to create this building or for people like us who after all these years are still using it?

Dante Bini: As a student of architecture, I have always had a fascination for domes and, in particular, for their construction systems. Domes have stimulated my imagination and they were the constant focus of my architectural attention. One of the oldest building existing today is a dome: The Pantheon in Rome now more than 2000 years old. In the 1960’s it was popular opinion that doubled curvature roofs and thin shell structures represented a new building expression and I was attracted by their inherent strength, beauty, simplicity and purity in shapes capable to last many years. To build a symbolic long lasting building for future young generations was my dream!

Yasmin: Today our cities are getting even bigger and more polluted. We keep building things the same way even though we know its unsustainable. How do you get past people saying your ideas are too unusual and wouldn’t work?

Dante Bini: It is very hard indeed to convince people that we must be the “craftsmen” of our time for the future generations. It is time to stop living only to swagger the success of the past without pay attention to a very delicate and pressing times approaching at the speed of light. This is the reason because we should think “out of the box” not only in developing new construction systems, but also “devising” new approaches in developing future town-plannings. We must consider super-modern urban faciities disconnected from existing settlements. We need to envision new way to produce and maintain infrastructures with the use of construction automation and robotics.

Tamia: Why build with concrete?

Dante Bini: Concrete is a natural ecologic material, It is a mix of water and cement which is a powdery substance made with calcined lime and clay. When mixed with water, cement form a mortar which, mixed with sand and gravel (aggregates), forms concrete which hardens over time. Concrete can be reinforced with steel or other fibrous materials. The ancient Romans called it Pozzolana, naturally produced by vulcano’s eruptions. Concrete is durable, is inflammable, resistant to impact, temporary moldable and very safe even under extreme hight and/low temperatures.Using concrete we will save wood and forest!

Toby: How do you build cities for the future?

Dante Bini: I was involved in the design 3 cities for the future: One is called Tower City, (for 600,000 people presented at the International Conference for Innovative Structures (Boston 1991) and published in Madrid (1992). This was an infrastructure build over a shallow costal seas by mobile factories and contained new lands to be landscaped). The second is called Try 2004 (for 1,000,000 people which was envisioned by the Japanese Shimizu Corporation in the bay of Tokyo and was the subject of a movie produced by Discovery Channel called “Extreme Engineering – A city in a Pyramid”). The third was K21(a new City model for future Urban Facilities) published in 1998 by the City of Kyoto. The common denominator of those project is the need to accept a modern regional and urban planning approach which could start by designating areas destined for future urbanization. It is imperative to minimize the indiscriminate physical, chemical and acoustic pollution of our cities and it is essential to contain and stop the dangerous tendency of cities to spread like oil drops, with the inevitable destruction of both the historical centre and the immediate surrounding ares.

Scarlet: Do you think architects think enough of people our age and the sorts of buildings we need to ensure the survival of our planet?

Dante Bini: Unfortunately, NO! Most of them are only thinking to build their own image and glorifying their ego!

Undrawing the Line presented a 3D drawing workshop as part of a three night series of dinners called The Long Table – an exchange between the Iraqi community in Fairfield and the broader arts community in Sydney. The event was organised by the Powerhouse Youth Theatre for the Little Baghdad project. Each night over 70 people shared dinner, conversations and experiences as they learned about the situation in Iraq. Contributors included; Zahra Alsamawi, Reewan Al-Mahanna, Layla and Firas Naji, Cigdem Aydemir, Sean Bacon, Karen Therese, Jiva Parthipan, Kate Blackmore, Nicole Barakat, Zanny Begg, Ali Hamadi, Bashar Hanna and the Choir of Love, Haitham Jaju and The Parent’s Cafe, Province and Undrawing the Line.

The new large scale 3D drawing The Chant of Nudimmud that Undrawing the Line has been working on as part of the Little Baghdad project will be installed on the facard of the PYT building on Saturday July 11 for Let’s Party Like it’s 620BC.

Undrawing the Line have been invited to participate in a residency at Powerhouse Youth Theatre (PYT) Fairfield to work on a new large scale drawing for the facard of the PYT building. The project was recently written up in the Fairfield Advance.